Gladwell, Essay Example

Prompt chosen to focus on

Gladwell seems to suggest that much of success is dependent on luck. He asserts in ‘the roll of the die’ that success depends on timing, birth, and opportunities. Do innate qualities (ambition or raw talent) have any role to play? In other words, is Gladwell’s argument correct, incorrect, and oversimplified or something else? Analyze his argument

Introduction

Success is the accomplishment of a purpose in life. Different people achieve it in different ways. In most cases, it can be luck or hard work. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book tries to give reasons as to why there is a significant disparity in success amongst different people. He explains their phenomenon of success. He came up with various perspectives on the reasons for success of these people. He then called the successful people “outliers.” This term is common in describing the observations in statistics that lie out of the normal distribution. Nearly successful persons amaze everybody. We take a lot of time trying to study them, but Gladwell, points out that it is about not only inherent talent and efforts of an individual, but also depend on the culture of the background, location, turns and twists in their growth, etc. This book assists people to know how to explore their potential, how their family members, parents, teachers, officials, and policy makers can aid in improving the process.

The author states that individuals do become rich from nothing. He says that we owe a lot to patronage and parenting. Some people may believe that they achieved by themselves. However, in essence, they are beneficiaries of unseen advantages, cultural legacies and extra ordinary opportunities that make them learn and be productive people globally. Gladwell begins with a society with issues of heart attack. He argues that no one under the age of 55 had signs of the disease. The rate of death from all known causes was approximately 35% lower that it was expected. The reason, according to him, was more than genetic content. It was the lifestyle, which made people healthy. Research showed that happy circumstances were because of unique ways of living. Sense of community, socializing, united family; simplicity and church are some of the contributing factors.

Reviewing Ideas and Choosing One Argument

The author points out that time of birth, IQ, self-confidence and determination and time in history play an important role in determine success of an individual. In his book, Gladwell reviews all this factors and how they affect success of an individual.

Concerning time, Gladwell gives an example of sport, in Canada, ice hockey played while baseball is to us (Malcolm 77). Cutoff date for children joining ice hockey is January 1. A child who turns 10 on second of January would play alongside those who do not turn ten until the end of the year. This is a twelve-month gap age, and it represents large variety in physical maturity. The older player is likely to be noticed more, receive better coaching and attention and is placed better to succeed. Simply, the little group of persons born near the cut off period, have a great advantage.

Hockey in Canada is strictly meritocracy on paper, though the method of selecting a team puts some children to advantage while disadvantaging others naturally. The same rule may be extended to scholastic improvement in schools. Children born at the last dates of an academic year, near the cutoff date may think that factors disadvantaging a younger one in kindergarten finally go away. Although just like hockey, it does not. The little first advantage, a student born in the early dates of an academic year remains the whole year. Gladwell point out that it locks the young person is into a pattern of achievements and underperformance, encouragement and discouragement, which continues for years. He mentions that the small advantage become bigger and bigger, until the person in context become a real “outlier”. This is an extraordinarily successful person. This shows the main lacunae in the way the current society unblocks and develops talent. He says that people tend to personalize success and fully neglect where the person has passed through. In the end, we may become unfair to those who would not succeed as the others. It is important to note that this is not their fault. In this regard, Gladwell suggests a simple solution; that in school, a section in a class may be created in a manner those students in the same level or simply age group, to nearest 3 months, be grouped together. This could let pupils learn and compare themselves with other students.

The author explains the success of prominent persons like bill joy, one among the leading computer programmers of that time. He was a founder of Microsystems and covers bill gates, the founder of Microsoft. He put that they were intelligent extraordinarily, and thus, they came up with ideas, which were out of the world at that time. Their capability to comprehend how technology world was progressing was fully amazing. They were working extremely hard. Research shows that it takes about ten thousand hours for one to be good at something (Adams 61). However, their success was not simply an issue of personal merit and commitment. He puts that they were lucky to get special opportunities, which they took with both hands.

The two, joy and gates, were born at the right time. When they were in college, computer revolution was nearly taking off. The two got well access to computer period, thus, Joy pursued computer programming at the university of Michigan computer centre. The centre had one of the best and advanced computer programs in the world. Joy was in university at the right time when the computer centre opened. Joy, unlike other people who worked hard with punched cards, was in a position to access time sharing that had come up. In the same way, bill gates went to do real time programming in 1968 as an eighth grader. Gates got special opportunity to study and learn computer programming until he completed high school. By the time he dropped Harvard and start Microsoft, he had been practically programming continuously for seven years. He had done this for more than ten thousand hours, threshold largely considered the point which individuals become real experts. The author quotes gates saying that he had good exposure to software development at a younger age more than anyone did in that period. He says that it was because of extraordinary lucky series of events. Gates and joy worked hard, but without being in the better place, accessing computing resources at the right time, they might not have done that much. Gladwell mentions that their success was not their own making.

Time in history where we belong plays a significant role in shaping the destiny of an individual. The United States experienced a demographic fall in the 1930s. Many families stopped getting children due to economic difficulty of the depression. Therefore, the generation born at that period was less than other generations. Belonging to such a small group comes with amazing advantages (Colvile 39). In the shaping process, IQ plays a significant role. However, it only applies up to some point. After that, practical experience matters. Most of success is about developing self-belief and confidence. The ecology in which individuals grow up mostly determines how determined and confident they are to prosper in life.

How Society Measures Success Is Important

To have a better world that is inclusive, we should replace the arbitrary advantages and patchwork of lucky breaks, which seem to be important in the success. Most people would be excluded automatically as a few forge ahead, if we leave it to happy circumstances of history and birth. We should work to avoid these advantages. Gladwell gives us insights of successful persons and tips on how children should be brought up. Therefore, it is important to discuss this issue.

Conclusion

Gladwell, in his book discusses how people achieve success. This book assists people to know how to explore their potential, how their family members, parents, teachers, officials, and policy makers can aid in improving the process. In this paper, time is analyzed. The time at which one is born determines success. Gladwell’s arguments are correct and he has simplified them. He gave many satisfying examples. His ideas should be used in measurement of success.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. The man who can’t stop thinking. 2^nd edn. London: The Guardian, 2008. Print.

Colvile, Robert. Outliners of Malcolm Gladwell. 2^nd edn. London: The daily telegraph, 2009. Print.

Malcolm, Gladwell. Story of success: Social science. 1^st edn. London: Little Brown, 2011. Print.